Summation: A young autistic woman, Zen, collects debts from people who owe her mother money, in order to pay for her ailing mother’s medical care. She is able to do this because she has an incredible kinetic memory: she learns to fight by mimicking Bruce Lee films and the fighters at the dojo next door.

There are almost no films in which the main protagonist is autistic, much less an autistic woman of color. This movie isn’t about what Zen means to other people; it’s about Zen’s motivations, needs, wants, and the journey to hone her skills. As an autistic person, seeing this kind of depiction of a capable, dynamic autistic character in film is extremely heartening, to say the least.

In this scene, the best fighter in the antagonist’s gang is a young man with Tourette’s Syndrome. The subtext of the scene is that Zen will have difficulty predicting his moves because his tics throw off her pattern-recognition-based kinetic memory.

This is one of my favorite movies, EVER.

I highly recommend it.

I just finished watching this with BF, who apparently hadn’t seen it yet (much to my surprise). This was the fifth or sixth time I’ve watched it and it continues to be awesome.